Dear Polona and Thomas,

Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful response to the reviewers.

Page 1 line 11: "from the Laptev"

Page 5, line 124: 'trustable' is not a word I would choose to use here, gramatically speaking.

Page 5, line 125: "qualitative studies e.g. sensitivity studies". I am not sure I understand, sensitivity studies are quantitative investigations of a model's sensitivity to various perturbations. I agree the sensitivity studies with a model that is not perfectly representing reality are valuable, your reasoning is not articulated well however.

Perhaps you could clarify that you are using the model to demonstrate the mechanism for preconditioning. The sensitivity study and model validation is instructive as it provides some idea of well the model can represent the magnitude of the feedback. I am not suggesting you do this, just suggesting your statement could be clearer. You might want to clarify in here that the sensitivity study can identify the direction of the feedback, and you do not expect the magnitude to be correctly simulated. (Later in the paper you may even be able to identify if the magnitude will be over or under-estimated in CNTR and CLIM runs).

Figure 5: legend is too small to read. Consider explaining colors in the caption.

Incidentally, in a sea ice model you should be able to split the summer ice area loss into export (transport, opening) and melt. So you could directly quantify the contribution of preconditioning to the summer open water area. It should even be possible to estimate the magnitude of the ice-albedo feedback and show how this relates to the preconditioning (early summer ice area). I realise that you do not need to do this to show the direction of the feedback between winter export and summer ice loss, just suggesting you can delve into the interannual variability in future.


Line 210: In years of low ice extent in summer, is there more solar absorption into the open water and storage of this heat? This could impact fall freeze up rates. In your experiment you are looking at the impact of winter (not fall), so I understand that this fall signal might not be apparent. It may, however, result in an overall lower value of ice production throughout the whole year. I only bring this up as it is not cut and dry that one summer does not impact the next in the seasonal ice zone. In the context of your experiment where you are comparing years with net opening verses those with net closing I suspect this phenomena is a smaller contribution than the meridional ice drift.

Line 216: "visualizes" is a strange choice of word here.

Line 235: Thanks for considering my comment about the climatology averging and reducing the wind.

Line 255: "negative"

Section 6.1: Can you clarify that all the results presented are observational analysis? Can you comment on what your model shows? Is there ocean warming in years with lower ice extent (does this jive with SST measurements from MODIS?). Does the model sufficiently resolve fast ice processes to show an accelerated decay in years of lower ice extent? Or is the basal melt parameterisation not present in the model yet?

Line 288: This reads awkwardly: "In addition, model simulations indicate that the volume export from Laptev Sea is increasing, since the thinning of the ice cover cannot compensate for the enhanced area export." I think what you are trying to say is "volume export from the Laptev Sea ice increasing, as enhanced opening supports enhanced ice growth-rates as the ice velocity is increasing."

Line 293: "Moreover we could show that ice dynamics in winter
not only precondition local summer ice extent, but also accelerate fast ice decay." While your model result shows the effect on summer ice extent, you do not show a casual effect on landfast ice. See my comments regarding section 6.1 in this respect. A correlation between years of high export and fast ice season end date is interesting, however is not indicative of a mechanism.

Thank you for your contribution. I am very happy to see a paper describing this preconditioning, it has been of interest to me for many years and it is nice to see evidence of the importance in recent summer ice extent.
Jenny